I was nursing a cold from the previous presentation in Zurich, but managed to get through the keynote presentation and journalist interviews before my voice degenerated into a strangled squeak.

Sadly, my Portuguese language skills are more or less non-existent (“bom dia! obrigado!”), so I wasn’t able to follow most of the presentations, but one of them, with slides in English, really grabbed my attention.

I’ve long been an advocate of IT organizations using business intelligence to optimize their own operations – because it’s a good idea (who could argue that IT isn’t an essential business function, or that it doesn’t need improving?), but also in order to provide a showcase to other organizations on how to use information effectively.

Ricardo Guerra of Volkswagen AutoEuropa gave a wonderful example of this. He explained how his organization uses a series of Xcelsius dashboards (soon to be renamed “SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards”) to track every aspect of their IT operations, gathered across many different systems.

The beautifully-crafted dashboards (created by SAP partner Novabase) are displayed on monitors at key locations throughout the organization. The goals of the project were to give an overview of the health of the IT systems, highlight and anticipate problems, facilitate communication and service quality, and manage IT contracts.

Each team (IT coordination, helpdesk, infrastructure, network, etc.) has a customized dashboard adapted to their key metrics, and an overall dashboard gives a side-by-side comparison of the performance of different teams.

The benefits quoted by Ricardo are very impressive:

Help desk: 22% reduction in abandoned calls and 95% reduction in the average wait time (for the same number of average staff)

Incidents: 38% reduction in the incident queue, 25% increase in resolution time, more often fixed on first attempt